Tag: marketing

Writers' Tools of the Trade, writing romance

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #3 TWITTER

I am a self-proclaimed promo ‘ho and proud of it. Day three of my favorite tools brings us one promotional platform I employ, Twitter. Yes, I will admit when I first heard about Twitter I didn’t get it at all. When I try to explain Twitter to my non-tweeting friends, I really can’t (in spite of my vast professional expertise as a wordsmith). So what is Twitter and why does it deserve to be named among my 7 most valuable tools of my trade? It’s a social networking site that limits user updates to 140 characters each Tweet unless you employ one of the lengthening tools (which I do sometimes, though I feel like I’m cheating when I do, LOL). It’s kind of like the user status updates you see on Facebook, but it’s a one way system. I can follow anyone I want and see their tweets. Anyone can follow me and see mine (unless I block them for being a perv or a spammer). It is not the mutual “friending” you find on Facebook profile pages. Since I use it as a professional tool, I do like the Twitter “follow” system better than the Facebook “friend” system. Now why […]

Cowboys

Holy Cow! Let’s Buck!

It takes a lot to surprise this jaded New Yorker, but one 19-year-old amateur bull rider from Oklahoma managed to do just that in a big way. Alvin Morris, the bull rider I sponsor who rides in a shirt embroidered with my Let’s Buck tagline and website and hands out bumper stickers printed with the same at rodeos in exchange for my covering his entrance fees, has gone above and beyond. Take a look at the below. I am still in shock. Yeah, that’s a real tattoo. The design came from the mudflap girls on his chaps, combined with my tagline, which he loved from the moment he first heard it. The below chaps also inspired the colors for the sponsor shirt Alvin wears, a black button-down with hot pink embroidery reading Let’s Buck www.catjohnson.net down his free arm. Before you non-ink people freak out and start with the “tattoos are forever” argument, let me launch my own defense. Alvin once told me he is going to ride until he “competes in the championship in Vegas or is too crippled to ride at all”, so I dare say bull riders are forever as well as tattoos. It’s just my guess, […]

Life

A Call for Troop Support

This next week is going to be busy with not one but two new eBook releases for me. I don’t want today’s post to get lost amid the marketing hubbub of promoting my books, but I also don’t want to delay this very important post either, so here it goes… Those who have been around here for awhile have heard me talking about my military muses. The stars aligned during October of 2006. By some twist of fate, I joined BooksForSoldiers.com and happened to stumble upon and respond to a request for care packages from a certain soldier deployed in Ramadi, Iraq at the time. It is so long ago, and so many care packages ago, I’m not even sure what the request was for. I believe Sean was building a library in the MWR and requested books. Being a newly published author at the time, I had books, and I sent them. The thank you email he sent me back started a friendship that has lasted nearly 4 years now. It also spurred a collaboration. Sean’s tales of war have inspired 3 of my military romances, and his fact checking keeps me on track during my writing in that […]